Notes From the Floor

In Defense of Dignity

You don't know how slow progress is until you have worked for 15 years on an issue and have had to count movement forward in promised but hypothetical yes votes, numbers of co-sponsors and the quality of conversations you have with those many who have been seemingly dead set against the issue since you began.

There are hundreds of people in Idaho who have worked longer than I have to see some basic level of respect and dignity afforded to gay people by Idaho law. I sit in the middle of the place where this progress is supposed to happen and I see well that we have a choice. We can grow bitter and complacent writing the Idaho legislature off as hopeless, or we can work hard and cling to the incremental progress, to the raw numbers of people willing to put their names on the line, attach themselves to the bill to make this small change finally happen, even in an election year. It is glacial but if you look, there is something there.

This year again there was again of course legislation before the Idaho Senate to add sexual orientation and gender identity to Idaho's human and civil rights laws, just as local governments have now done in Salt Lake City Utah this past fall and in Pocatello, in Boise and in cities and states all across the West over the past decade. This year Idaho's legislation however never saw the light of day. The chairman would not allow it even an introductory print hearing to assign the the bill a number and put it in the state computer. Yet realize that we now have four solid yes votes in the committee, up from the three we had last year, but just shy of the five we need to get the bill actually passed from committee and to the floor of the Senate for a vote. That is progress. In many ways that is huge progress.

Senate State Affairs is a tough committee. It grew tougher for human rights issues when Brad Little left Senate Republican Majority leadership to stand over the Senate as our Lt. Governor. Russ Fulcher, very kind and willing to listen but religiously much more the fundamentalist, took Brad's place in leadership and on the State Affairs Committee. 

Other committees are far less tough and this year's human and civil rights bill would have no trouble being printed there. In one or maybe two committees it might even pass. But State Affairs is the Committee that the Pro Tem and leadership use like a sieve for social issues. Anti-immigrant bills, anti-abortion bills, anti-gay constitutional amendments and now any positive human rights legislation. Yet this is the committee we have to go through to get even a simple hearing, a chance for people to explain why our state will be a better place if we chose as a law making body to legislate that injustice against gay people is in fact also injustice; that it is the policy of the state that discrimination is wrong and that gay people will no longer be omitted — because an omission of such an obvious and targeted group says only one thing: it says that discrimination and denial of basic dignity, human and civil rights to students, renters, business customers and employees in our sate is acceptable. We say every day by virtue of this lingering omission that such discrimination is acceptable.

Idaho is a live-and-let-live state. The fear some of my colleague's feel for this issue is strange in the face of the fact that so many people now know someone gay and that young people can not imagine why we live in a world where such injustice is acceptable policy. Three years ago 64% of Idahoans and a solid majority in every part of the state said that it should be illegal to fire people just because they are gay. What I know is change will only happen when that ordinary majority of Idahoans stop law makers on the street and say kindly that they care, that they support an improvement in Idaho law to extend dignity, civil and human rights to gay people just as we do to all people based on age, religion,sex, national origin, disability and race.

The legislature has heard from gay people for well more than 15 years and our voices I fear sometimes are seen as those of a tiny minority speaking desperately for itself. For a second year I say, we can't do this alone. We need our co-workers, neighbors, parents, friends, classmates, teachers and employers to speak up with us now.

I give deepest thanks to the fearless in the Senate who have stood up for and with us when it was hard: Joe Stegner, Tim Corder, and Edgar Malepeai. To former Senate Majority Leader Bill Roden who, with House Assistant Minority Leader James Ruchti, was ready to present the bill before Chairman Curt McKenzie and the Senate State Affairs Committee, and to the 27 co-sponsors below I say, your actions and bravery mean the world to us. 

SENATE CO-SPONSORS:

Edgar Malepeai, Joe Stegner, Kate Kelly, Elliot Werk, John Andreason, Gary Schroeder, Tim Corder, me, Les Bock.

HOUSE CO-SPONSORS:

James Ruchti, John Rusche, Bill Killen, Tom Trail, Wendy Jaquet, Donna Boe, Elaine Smith, Shirley Ringo, George Sayler, Anne Pasley-Stuart, Donna Pence, Sue Chew, Liz Chavez, Phylis King, Branden Durst, Grant Burgoyne, Elfreda Higgins, Brain Cronin.

This list does not include the many Republicans and Democrats who now will vote for the bill when it comes to the floor of the House and Senate, that list is growing long and wonderful. These above are the law makers willing to put their names on the line up front. I hope you will thank them.

To sign the petition in support of next year's legislation and to get involved go HERE.

Pan Back

The statehouse has been quiet today while many legislators are away for Atwell Parry's funeral. The long marble halls which connect the two underground wings seem empty, while upstairs movie cameras on mechanical arms swivel as Idaho media day shows off what is going on in on of Idaho's little known creative and often highly technological industries.

And here in the now marbled depths my inbox keeps filling with letters asking us to save Idaho Public Television. In JFAC this morning IPTV brought a second camera on line so that now in the coming weeks you can watch the expressions on our faces, the lines in our foreheads as we debate motions to cut, to fund or to de-fund every state service under the sun.

And still the wheels turn. Mike Jorgenson & John McGee's anti-immigration bills seek to make it yet harder for farms and ranches to harvest crops and do business. We debate again which disability services to make more expensive and whether or not we should mandate that insurance companies cover oral chemotherapy drugs just as they would injectable chemotherapy. We all work away on slightly narrower slices of bills — those with no cost associated. The Human and Civil Rights legislation that so many have worked on for four years is no exception. There is still a group of law makers dedicated to it. The group is more bi-partisan than ever and more diverse, fueled by success in adding sexual orientation and gender identity in similar non-discrimination measures in Pocatello, Caldwell and especially Salt Lake. 

This session will be like many others and yet not. There is no magic stimulus on the horizon galloping forward to make us giddy with relief, just sober numbers we can chose to change or choose to force the people of Idaho to live with.

Pan out to lines of people waiting for food stamps; pollution leaking into drinking water aquifers, lakes and steams that DEQ will not test for the second year in  row; school offices where administrators calculate which teacher will take the extra students as teachers and counselors are laid off; closed signs hang on offices; paint peels; state pay checks shrink. Pan back far enough and the place gets green-gray with peaks white, more eternal and seemingly impervious. We will get through this. Now is the hard part.

Dreaming of Fire

This is my Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Day Speech for BSU's 2010 March and Rally. I will be joining student leaders, our Human Rights community and wonderful speakers at Boise City Hall at about 11:15. At noon we will all join the Human Rights Commission inside the Capitol rotunda as they return to the tradition of holding a Human Rights Celebration in the statehouse.

Dreaming of Fire

…To me hope is sometimes a fragile thing. It burned bright
in me a year ago as our country inaugurated a president who embodied the
reality of the Dream. I myself stood on grounds of our nation’s Capitol gazing
at the faces that now comprise our beautiful nation, a nation of colors,
creeds, talents and dreams that are finally passing from sleep into waking.
 

But today in Idaho I fear the collective light of the Dream
has suffered in the bitter months of this winter… sadly here we face the
chilling anger of people at computers and town halls desperate to place blame
as they stagger too under the weight of profound economic injustice.
 
We face the chill of Governor Otter’s proposals to
eliminate, to phase out, the few agencies of the state charged with advancing
human rights for Latinos, for people with disabilities, the deaf and the
blind…. our Human Rights Commission itself .

Idaho’s Governor rejects the very entities
we have charged with advancing equality and justice for those denied it for so long.
 

Is that acceptable to us?

Will that help Idaho further the dream?

Will this ensure the fair treatment of people we call
family, coworkers, classmates, and friends ?
 

No. We know this is wrong. Though it has been four decades,
Dr. King’s words still have the power to warm us and guide our nation from
within — like a bon fire. Sadly in Idaho while the dream often wanes, its
burning pieces are still held by each of us who hope, who work, who stand up in
the streets to protect or welcome others or to instill in our children a tiny
fire of their own.
 

But inside us Dr. King’s dream, our dream can be a fragile
thing, an ember of fire, a warmth and promise of justice that you — like me —
may have kept from the wind, may have tucked deep in your clothes –carried in
your chest, pulled out and held tight in your hands every time the world around
you faltered, made you unwelcome or fell in its progress toward equality and
justice.
 

And while hope glows in the windows of the white house and
in bits of policy in the nation’s capitol — while we hope for a day when none
will again face bankruptcy in the face of cancer – and while we hope for a day
when families will re-unite, fear will fade, and our country will recognize its
need for the nations and people to the South – that day is not yet here.
 

…..Instead we look up to a state government set on stalling
progress.
 
We walk streets that bleed harsh words while too many
Idahoans have waited too long, holding embers of hope smothered daily by words
of cruelty – a boy taunted on a playground for his delicate walk; the woman
with her children on a street made unwelcome; a girl trying in vain to get
beyond the stairs; a driver arrested for his differences, his color; the man demonized not
for actions but for the accent on his tongue. —-When our daily experiences
stifle the dream, we grow cold, isolated and the ember of that promise can fade
inside us.
 

I ask one thing of each of you today………. We can be a state
kinder than our policy makers. We can ourselves create a state of promise in
spite of those who would divide us, those who would marginalize or demean those
we love or care for, our neighbors, coworkers, family, friends.
 

I ask you to practice using your own voice, your breath to
erase the cold someone you know has felt. Think of someone who has faced hate,
who has stood in the face of discrimination.
 
Think. Picture that person now, see him or her in your mind.
(It is OK if that person in your mind is you.) I want you in your mind to
say to that person, to someone you have met, or seen or know…….
 

“You — your presence, your voice, your work, your
questions..”  I want you to say: “You
make our state a better place.”
   

Now whisper that aloud with me, look around, say that to
every person here who has reeled in the face of harsh or cruel words…… “You
make our state a better place.”
 

In your minds eye, your words, your breath, think of it
igniting that ember of hope just a little in a person’s hands, your words in
their mind replacing words of rejection they have faced once, twice, maybe
many, many times.
 

Say it again with me, to each other, this time louder. “You
make our state a better place.”
 

OK one last time, this time let’s make sure Senator Malepeai
can hear us inside the Capitol. Let’s have our words carry North to the Coeur
d’Alene & Nez Perce tribes, South to the Shoshone Paiute, East to the
Shoshone Bannock, West to Nampa, Caldwell, Wilder, high into the mountains and
to the place the person in your mind can hear us……..
 
“You make our state a better place.”
 

Thank you. Now use that phrase in the streets when you see
someone face cruel gestures of unwelcome. Keep Dr. King’s Dream warm, keep it
burning in Idaho — through everything that is to come, through what we each
will see and feel and do in our lives ahead.
 

May we be strong and united and may we never ever give our
seats or our voices to those who would take them.

Without Fischer: Less Violence

I keep getting asked how I feel about Bryan Fischer leaving Idaho. Quite frankly what is most striking is how i feel when I think of the impact he has had in the time he has been here, relentlessly repeating the cruel words of national anti-gay groups and spending long days in the legislature with people who should know better than to listen to him.

But of course the media has covered him solidly. That love of controversy has earned him front billing whenever he wanted it. There are not a lot of people willing to dedicate their lives to hurting other people and doing so with a megaphone in public life. So he got covered. The media made him louder, more powerful and more virulent than he might have been somewhere else.

You know when young people write to me about hope, hope that someday they will not be hated or pitied for being gay or where they will feel safe and not ridiculed or targeted for violence, I think of Bryan Fischer. If it was his goal to ensure that gay teens in Idaho would find themselves in a hostile world, then he accomplished that.

Idaho has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the nation. Typically in any state about 1/3 of all teen suicides are related to teens struggling with coming out or with conflicts within themselves as to whether or not they are gay. If a parent were inclined to be uncomfortable with their child being gay, sure enough Bryan Fischer would be in the paper over the past decades, talking about how we gay people destroy families and live dangerous lifestyles. Of course he has always hammered away at the idea that being gay is a choice. For a parent and that child, something changes when that is the frame within which you exist. For the parent there is the sense that the child can be forced not to be gay. For the child there is the hostility of those statements, the devaluation of the lives of people who are gay, and the conflict of failure when young people, especially young men find that they can no more make themselves straight than their straight peers can force themselves to find boys attractive and make themselves gay. The idea that gay people can be "fixed" or reprogrammed has long been found false, yet Fischer and people like him know that by insisting that being gay is a choice, they can make it a moral issue, make young people and all of us feel that if we were better people we would not be gay.

I'm sorry, but I think the criticism of Bryan Fischer is all too mild. This man, through his relentless words has incited hatred and violence. He has impacted thousands of lives daily, not for the better, by assisting in forcing through a constitutional amendment not just to ban marriage but to hugely complicate our lives by ensuring that we can in no way be recognized as couples by the state or any government in Idaho. Every year in Idaho we will be turned away from emergency rooms or the bedside a partner who is dying. When we die, our joint possessions can by default be taken away from our partner and given to estranged parents or siblings. Already, our social security benefits can not go to our partners. But here in Idaho now, some couples have had to struggle just to get a family gym membership or health insurance from anti-gay companies like Blue Cross.

The cruelty of all this, the lack of Christian values in working to create an environment where real people suffer, where good people suffer, is what is so hard to take. Young people die at their own hands in this state and I lay some of that blood at Bryan Fisher's feet. When you spend your life perpetuating hate against a group of people, people die, people are beaten and harassed and fired from their jobs and even murdered.

The recent death of Dr. Tiller just shows further how hate leads to violence. Fischer
can claim he does not condone violence, but how many times did he
ensure that those listening would not do harm to those he condemned? I
don't recall a single time.

I wish Bryan Fischer's departure meant an undoing of all the pain and harm he has done to so many. Sadly it doesn't. That is up to the rest of us including that vast majority of Idahoans who know gay people as family, friends, co-workers and classmates. We have to make the changes that end the violence and suicide.

The tide has long been turning against people like Fischer. There were times he was shunned in the legislature, especially in the House under Speaker Bruce Newcomb. I think he found luke warm response to his anti-gay rants and recently focused instead more on promoting absurd fear around gender identity and cross dressing. Nationally, efforts to divide our country over gay people have worn thin but I'm sure Fischer will find others to demean and condemn. I send a quiet apology off into the rain today to the people of Mississippi. I'm sorry you get him now.

Hate, Spit & the Word Gay

A few weeks back I asked people to post signs on their cars, homes and places of work that said in big letters, "Protect Our Gay Friends, Amend Idaho's Human Rights Act." The word gay was particularly big, maybe 7.5 inches wide by 4 inches tall. You couldn't miss it.

My partner Carol and I put one of these paper signs in the back side window of our car. We are gay people and it would be surprising if anyone living around us had not noticed by now that we are gay. Yet still I guess I was taken aback when one morning after we posted the little paper sign, that someone clearly spit on that window of our car. And if a day or two of the spitting was not enough, I drove to a meeting one night and someone put an obscene little flier on my windshield. I admit some places I started parking lately, I wondered if the car would be safe. I knew we would have to take the sign down to go to my mom's place near Challis.

This is all to say that I do recognize that perhaps I was asking too much. That even I might forget how much anger or hate or cruelty there is in the world, that I would ask people to open themselves up to hate, especially straight allies or gay people in rural areas where there is so little safety, that I would put anyone at risk bothers me.

I figure I have grown isolated living in the north end. But if I am isolated to what happens, my legislative colleagues are far more so. They might not see the gleeful cruelty or seething in Bryan Fischers web posts and missives. They might not have visited the web sites where people talk about me as a gay person and about guns in threatening ways. They might not have read the recent email to me saying I should leave Boise because there are people who moved here from places like California to get away from gay people like me. The email was a bit more harsh in its language. I won't quote it.

In essence I reel with trying to comprehend how many of my colleagues do not believe discrimination happens while all around them it does and I only wish they would put one of those big gay signs on their cars and see what happens.

But I don't want to ask that. I don't want to ask that of anyone. So I found better signs. They say "Human Rights for ALL: Amend Idaho's Human RIghts Act." I don't think they will put anyone at risk. As a nation we do believe in Human Rights. As a state the vast majority know people need them. I feel better asking people to post these signs. I think more people will. I know I was asking too much with the other ones.

It was like with talking to one of my colleagues about how best to go about passing the changes to the Human Rights Act we need in order to protect gay people. He said we needed to find a way to do it so that we don't have to say gay, or sexual orientation or gender identity. I'm thinking it is a bit hard to write a law that won't mention the people it is supposed to protect. There is a lot of room for misinterpretation there. If anyone has ideas I'll take them.

Short of that, it is just going to have to become a bit more safe to say the word gay. A lot more people are going to have to say the word (kindly) or wear those signs that say gay someday. Straight people too, until it gets more safe and normal for all of us to see people be OK with the word gay. For the word gay to be boring would be ideal. For now I have the signs that say "Human Rights for ALL" and don't say gay in big letters. Because we are not there yet.

You can get a sign to print for your car or house. While the words don't have the force of law, with time they can show more people care, ordinary people everywhere around Idaho. That's what matters. And I feel pretty sure that, even without the word gay, people will know what we mean.

Horrible Power

No where in the legislature is our power as legislators more evident than on the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee. There more than anywhere we are like godzilla-sided toddlers roaming across the landscape of government, too tall to see the detail of what's below, too big to look in the windows and figure out through the course of a year what's really going on. We rely on staff and I picture them some days like all too generous parents, gently trying to keep us from doing damage while providing us with everything we need in order to do what we will do each day.

With a single motion we can unexpectedly lay people off as we did with the office of species conservation last week. In my pink onesies I burped out the final deciding yes vote and they were gone.

With a single motion we can build a bit of a fervor around something and kill a whole agency as we did with the women's commission this morning. The $23,000 agency is gone. I was the only Democrat to vote yes for getting rid of it. My reasons were very different from my colleagues who claimed budget constraints and duplication. I voted to eliminate the Women's Commission because it is an absurd joke to expect a $23,000 agency with one part-time staff person to achieve pay equity and end disparities in the status of women in Idaho. Ending inequalities is not supposed to be like playing house. I don't think we as a legislature should get to put forward this agency to help us pretend this state government really cares.

We Can’t Do it Alone

Carol and I ran up in the foothills this morning. Frozen sandy
trails thread up along ridge tops for miles. We found ourselves in
snow, brilliant white in the sun, cold on our tennis shoes.

Rough week trying to decide where to go from here as human rights issues appear so clearly to be slipping backward in Idaho.

There is irony in all this. Bryan Fischer
says my election to the legislature means there is no problem with
discrimination in Idaho. I had to laugh and then cry this morning on
the trail running behind Carol on the frozen ground because that is so
much like saying that, because we elected a fine man who happens to be
black as our 44th president of the United States, that it follows
logically that there is no longer racism or racist people in the United
States, that we can just take black people out of Idaho’s Human Rights
Act or federal anti-discrimination laws because no American will ever
again perpetuate acts of racism, violence or discrimination against
black people in schools or businesses or anyplace in our nation ever
again.

….

So to that end I am going to ask a favor.
If you care that gay people are ever fired from our jobs, denied raises
or promotions, kicked out of our apartments, are harassed as teens and
made unwelcome in school classrooms anywhere in this state, please do
something about it this year.

1.    Email your friends these two links and ask them to help. 

Support your gay friends: https://www.4idaho.org/HumanRights/
POST THIS WINDOW SIGN: https://www.4idaho.org/vote/OurGayFriends-WindowSign.pdf
2.    Post a “Protect Our Gay Friends” Window sign in your car, house or workplace.
3.    Let YOUR three state legislators know that you feel it is time to end discrimination against gay people in employment, housing and education.
4.    Write a letter to the editor.
5.    Get involved this year when there is a chance to help an organization on this issue. (Show up, donate, take action.)

…..

It
kills me that my work on sentencing or health care may suffer because
it is not really the role of a legislator to be a community organizer.
It kills me that some of my colleagues have said I have to make a
choice, be a gay activist or have no future in politics in Idaho.
Really I have no choice.

I think of the straight people I meet who clearly care and want to help.

The
burly firefighter who told me he buttonholed Senator Fulcher at a
recent reception to say firmly but politely how upset he was as a
constituent that Fulcher had opposed the Human Rights act. I think of
the man who came to me to talk about health care issues and, as he was
leaving, mentioned how wrong it was that some radio talk show hosts
were say such awful things about me and gay people.

I think of my friend Emilie Jackson-Edney and her wonderful conversations about gender identity with Senator Coiner.

I think of
Mountain Goat, the blogger in Canyon County whose partner fears being
fired from her job. I know this woman only by her pen name and her
posts and I picture her these days settled next to a radio watching the
hate stream out day after day because she knows someone has to say that
this is wrong. She is so right. How can we as a state stand by when
others incite violence and hate. Why are we not outraged? Or maybe we
all are outraged and we don’t know how to express it.

Well, I’m
offering some ways to express it. And I’m asking for your help. Because
I can’t do this alone. The tiny cluster of under-funded, human rights
oriented, non-profit groups who have worked on these issues for over a
decade and have three staff between them, they can’t do this alone.

We
all need your help this year because if we don’t have your help things
will keep getting worse, not better. And like you, I just can’t bear
that.

Rights and Freedoms

No small number of Republican lawmakers have Democratic wives. They
are fabulous and in some cases outspoken and lead the legislative
ladies on adventures to places some of the Republican women otherwise
might never go.

One legislative husband, Skip Smyser, former
law maker himself and lobbyist but not a Democrat has done more for
Human Rights education in the legislature than I will ever do in my
lifetime. He rents out the Egyptian and gets lawmakers together to see
a movie each year. This year it was Amazing Grace a film about ending
the British slave trade. Actually it is very much a movie about the
legislative process as men in powdered wigs battle in a chamber that
makes even Idaho's house of Representatives look sedate and
dispassionate.

Skip's movie nights kill me emotionally. I sit
eating candy and cry as discreetly as I can possibly manage. Other law
makers cry too. Progressive law makers say kind things to me after. My
socially conservative friends instead quote the few lines from the film
that keep them sternly entrenched where they are on the other side of
any Human Rights issues at hand. Talking afterward it is hard to
believe they saw the same movie I did. But they did and I can only hope
that later in dreams more will come back to them, that they will soften
and see something like the shadow of pain in the eyes of others for a
brief moment in time.

Tonight at the Dairymen's dinner, a
colleague quoted to me a line from the movie Amazing Grace. It was
about having to give up your freedoms because someone else is in a
hurry to have government protect someones rights.

I had to grip
my beer glass tight to really hear the assertion that slave owners gave
up their "freedom" to make money off the labor of men and women they
never paid a salary to. How do I fathom someone seeing that as a
"freedom" to be taken from slave owners rather than as a thing they had
stolen from some other human beings… I do not know. I do know that
these are the same lawmakers who see Idaho's human rights act as a law
that robs them of the freedom to fire whom they choose, a restriction
on their business and beliefs that remains intolerable to them so far
to this day.

Losing Ground in Silence

Sitting at my desk on the floor of the Senate. Outside it is growing warm and across Boise people are planting spinach.

Only one bill to go before we break for the weekend and all fly off home. I will fly the ten or so blocks home to dig my hands in the dirt and try to forget this day for just a few hours at least, just until it is time to start planning for how to change this downward slide in the advancement of our rights here in this tiny isolated red red state. Just a few hours until we can figure out how to end the silence and make this issue clear and unavoidable in every corner in every little town of this thawing state.

On a simple print hearing vote this morning where seven committee members heard from Senator Coiner first and then from me on why more than 42,000 people deserve to be able to work at their jobs, go to school and live in a house or apartment without fear, the senate state affairs committee voted five to two not to introduce the proposal as a bill.

Not to even give it the courtesy of print. Not to acknowledge that discrimination against gay people might be a problem worth discussing inside the state's law making body.

Clearly we have far far to go and need many more voices in there with ours because people all over this state live quietly in fear every day. In school rooms, in board rooms, at desks, in processing plants and apartment complexes. What are the values of a state which, by omission, condones discrimination year after year, whose law makers know better, but refuse to stand up and act.

The committee members asked not a single question. Senator Stegner, always valiant, made the motion to approve the introduction of the bill. Senator Kelly seconded. The committee was silent but for their brief voice vote. Five to two. No.

Being Brave for Gay People

Surreal

It is hard to describe this day. It has four main parts. I will try to explain it.

The first was about cutting millions out of budgets for the next six months. Those are the "holdbacks." They take money away from what we budgeted last year for January to June or the second half of "fiscal year 09."  I voted "no" on one of them, the one that took huge chunks out of several different parts of our "medicaid" health care and welfare budgets…

The second part of the day was a rally on the temporary statehouse steps where I climbed down through signs and bundled bodies to find hundreds of people with disabilities and their families gathered to protest huge pending cuts to the therapy services many depend on. They are concerned that without support and help that many there would never have had the chance to become as independent as they are. They are concerned that parents will have to ask taxpayers to foot the larger bill to put their kids in expensive homes and institutions; that they won't be able to work and care for their kids; that a traditional day care won't take them or if they do that their children will just be warehoused, not taught skills, independence and self esteem.

One man in a wheel chair who works with kids with developmental disabilities spoke slowly and, in his nervousness, almost incomprehensibly into the hand held microphone. Someone re-read his eloquent speech. In another time he might never have had a chance to use a computer to write that speech. He might have been assumed to have no intellect, no voice.

The third part of the day was where we sat and listened to Mike
Ferguson from the Governor's budget office try to talk our committee down
from the ledge. It seems we on the Revenue Outlook Committee (I sit on this and the budget committee, JFAC) are far less optimistic about the economy than the Governor. Each of us on the committee was supposed to
guess how much in sales and income tax Idahoans will earn and spend and thus pay this year based
on what economists and industry lobbyists themselves are predicting.

My number or revenue estimate was the
smallest. and even the committee "median" or middle number was $101 million
smaller than the Governor's. Again, it was $101 million smaller. This would mean that even the Governor's deep cuts will have to be deepened. We decided to go with the median. That is now what we on JFAC, the Joint Finace and Appropriations Committee, will have to spend as we set budgets this year. Hundreds of millions less than we had last year.

My number was very low. To some extent we discussed it and how low things really might go. I looked at my number and at the very low committee median and thought what another $101 million of shortfall will mean to people all over Idaho. I can only hope I am very wrong, that a year from now we can all laugh at my doom. I have never wanted to be wrong so much in my whole life.

The final part of the day was a meeting with the people from Medicaid. The gate keepers. Someone once called them the bean counters. I don't think the name was chosen by someone who thinks well of counting beans. These men and women have the dreadful job of deciding who gets help with medical care and who does not, how much, at what cost, and what will not be covered and under what circumstances. I suppose if you continually give people like this less money and fewer people to work with at lower and lower wages, what happens is they get a bit cold and hard. They learn to hate the waste and ugliness in things rather than seeing the beauty and the value.

The bean counters have to work with a system of private providers, some of who are in it because they have a passion for improving the lives of people with disabilities. Some are in it because there is money to be made. If i was ever not a fan of privatization, I really am not now. If it does not open up the most vulnerable of our society to exploitation, then at least it makes us fear that everyone providing the services is trying to exploit the system, even if they are not.

It is like the way some of my legislative colleagues have described people with disabilities, or their parents, as being able to do nothing for themselves. In this fourth and final part of the day, one person in the room said that the families who wrote to him, the very same as those families on the steps, expected the state to do everything for them.

As someone who benefited from special education as a child and who worked as a personal care attendant through part of college, I never in my life expected to hear words like those out of the mouth of someone I know and care about.

How hard is it to describe living with a single desire just to be able to do EVERYTHING for yourself. Not to need people to open doors for you, not to have more time on tests, not to need an adaptive device or to be able to afford one and have it always work. How do you describe a family that needs to pay the rent like any other but where for her entire life their daughter can not be left alone. How do you describe how hard people work just to be allowed to hold jobs or finish a sentence just explaining how they feel.

At the Doors of Justice

Nicole's speech on LGBT equality at Boise City Hall at noon Saturday, January 10th 2009.

Friends, Idahoans we have struggled for decades and millennia up a steep hill toward the doors of the house of justice….

In small towns we’ve lived quietly hoping to pass unnoticed.
We’ve been taunted, harassed and demonized.
Millions of us have cried in school hallways, alone in bathrooms and school yards.
We’ve taken our lives as teens and adults broken in half unable to bear a life alone in hostility.
We’ve lost jobs, families, churches, children.
We’ve been told we deserve hate, deserve loneliness
and only rarely from above in the house of justice has anyone shone a light into the darkness for us, has anyone tried to help us up that hill from above
—only rarely from that place of power has anyone ever even said our names.

Friends, five years ago from his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 Barack Obama said our names. Unlike any politician speaking to a prime time audience on a national stage he spoke to us, his “gay friends in red states,” including us then in his vision of American.

From drag queens standing up to police brutality on the shores of the Atlantic to Harvey Milk dying at the hands of hatred in a marble building in another city far away on the Pacific…… we have worked toward justice again and again only to be sent back down the hill yet further time and time again into the mire.

Friends, today as we stand here in the cold, Soldiers, men and women serving in Iraq face worse consequence for living as human beings than they did twelve years ago. They are told today that it is dishonorable to be both patriotic and honest. They are told in US law, something no American should ever be told. They are told that to protect their livelihood, their careers and their families, they must lie.

What kind of a nation holds up gay Americans as heroes in the arts, in sports, in entertainment and even politics, and then with laws tells us that in one place we can marry, can have all the rights of our straight brothers and sisters, but that on the other side of a boarder, on a different date in the same city that those rights and duties and privileges, the very keys of full personhood are not ours to have.

Friends we have climbed up the hill for a long, long time and we have slid back in the mud of hate, greed and partisan politics, but today we stand here in Boise, Idaho, ten days from the day that Barack Obama, a community organizer, state legislator, US Senator, writer and diplomat…. one who has struggled for decades beside us…. we stand here ten days from the day that he will walk through those doors of justice himself.

He will bring part of the nation with him through those doors on the 20th of January.

Friends, we are there almost to those the doors ourselves today. It may not be this month or this year that we achieve full equality but I’ve looked three times into the eyes of the man who will be our new president and I know he has a fire in him for justice.

If any man can sit in that white house on that hill and ask a nation to change not just its laws but its minds for us, it will be him.

We know he can not do it alone. All across the nation today and over the next months and year we will be gathering on the lawns of houses of justice and asking not just a man, but a nation to hear us. We will be standing here as long as it takes, with our families and co-workers, church members, neighbors and class mates beside us, now, for the sake of justice, equality and all that makes us a nation, it is time for Congress and for our state legislatures, our courts and our neighbors to speak our names in respect and in law…… and to finally let us in.

Sitting Down with the Reverend

It is a bit hard listening as our nation grapples with the role of religion in government and the right of religious institutions to define marriage, or to grant or deny marriage to me or to people I love. Right now too, debate rages about how we make change and who has to be at the table to get down this last bit of road to legal equality. Do we need anti-gay religious leaders at the nation's table or will that set us back and turn progress into hate?

I don't think we can deny that if we want equality, we have to change some minds. President Obama surely knows he has to change some minds.

On most issues like employment discrimination our country is there with us in agreement that firing people because they are gay is wrong. On marriage we are tipping in a balance. Those who have lived in states where we can marry, seem to find the ominous mystery gone. In other states the level of comfort is not yet there. The conversation has not been had.

Real change is a process. As a law maker, I know well that to pass the actual laws (which community  organizers and brave people for decades have worked to prepare the ground for,) we still need to remind Congress how ready our nation is for change. We need huge numbers of people to stand up with us on the issue of legal equality. We as a community need to be visible and to ask our straight friends to help.

Sadly, laws are a measure of progress long over due, but they alone can't protect every one of us in every small town from Burley, Idaho to Bangor Maine. We need national leaders and neighbors who stand up with us before we will get there.

To see real change, those who still hate or fear us as gay people have to see us as human and see our lives through our eyes just a little.

Getting there is slow. It takes time and serious patience to listen to another person's story and to hear it without judgement and make sure they hear a bit of your story as well. Remember that people are raised to hate. It is not spontaneous. You have to be willing to know you won't change someone's mind in one conversation, which means of course that if you are disrespectful in that first conversation you never get to come back and keep working at helping them see what it is like to have a government nullify your marriage or stand by when you are harassed or fired from a job you loved for no other reason than that you happen to be gay.

I would never say we can not be angry. In an era where our culture so seems to embrace our roles in art, science, politics, education, sports and the military, how can our government stand by while a very few work to deny us legal equality? I still get teary listening to NPR trying to comprehend how anyone could go so far as to intentionally hurt loving people who are just trying to live their lives and protect their families under the law.

We can't pretend we are not angry. How can we not be angry sometimes right now? But to get this last distance to legal equality, we as gay people will have to be very disciplined. We have to be calm and focused on the change we have to bring.

It may feel frightening, but if we want a seat at the table we will will have to sit down with people we don't agree with, with some who have not shown us respect in the past. We can not change every mind, but by calmly organizing and working hard to show what is lost to this culture without our contributions, to show the harm from the laws and amendments passed, and to accept that good people can have awful beliefs, we can I think help our country travel this last bit of road.

Survival

…

Put the head phones on and wow. Here I am. The message-focused, issue-automaton that I become falls away and its just me here at the computer on the floor listening to Taj Mahal, Tracy Chapman and Concrete Blonde. I’ve literally been too busy spinning here between committee and balcony, key board and sleep to dig out the ear phones and listen to music here since weeks back in February.

    We are far from there now. Today I went to the press conference which some of Boise’s stalwart Human Rights organizations had pulled together, there out on the lawn as the rain turned to white snow. We discussed Senate Bill 1323… a bill saying I, as a gay person, am human. I matter. Saying that this state agrees that harm against me is not OK. Saying that firing me or throwing me out of my apartment for no other reason than that I’m gay is not O.K. What state or nation would not up hold that value?

    Odd day today. Full of odd moments. I’ve written so much e-mail that my brain now naturally streams bill phrases, numbers, consequences, debate. The music here in the head phones reminds me that I can survive anything, even as good bills go down and bad ones creep ever forward. If it all gets to me for a day or two each session, I’m doing pretty well. I have a well of strength from many places. Carol’s brilliant humor, my years in the wilds, having seen a world where I know never to pity myself too much. I’ve seen lives people live elsewhere in the world. I can survive anything here.

Here’s one I will share……. Having walked alone for hours following foot prints, through deep snow at first, and then downhill for miles along the winding dirt road out of a Tibetan mountain town through forest, toward the boarder with Nepal. An army jeep stopped and I took a ride with a group of Chinese military men in uniform. It was a ride that I know from the faces and voices there in the cramped seats very nearly went wrong. I speak no Chinese only some Nepali and when I insisted on getting out, I was on a huge hill side above the boarder gate. Rocks fell constantly across the road from high up in the rain and I threaded my way down huge switchbacks until a voice below the road called out. An old man sat there under a low piece of corrugated metal. He invited me in with hand gestures. Leaning over a little fire, he made Tibetan tea for me, a kind of salty yellow soup made with yack butter. He showed me how to dip little dough balls made from tsampa flour into the warm broth and I sat with him, communicating with gestures and smiles there in his shelter of tin by the road side where he had pulled me out of the rain to share with me what food he had.

Ending Debate

White haired Reverend of anti-gay causes, Brian Fischer, caught up with me in the brown marble stair case last week. He wanted to tell me that he wants us to get along. I said, as long as you are pushing legislation which affects my life, that will be hard. He said he didn’t want it to be personal. I said, it’s my life, my family. That is personal.

    Oddly, Reverend Fischer nodded. When you debate him on issues he doesn’t give up. Like with me, there is no end to it with him. I guess that’s because you can’t debate different values and priorities. If one person thinks another is unworthy of rights and they see that belief as sanctioned in their religious documents, how do you debate that? You can debate whether their religion should be expressed in Idaho law, but can not really debate the belief itself. But Fischer looked up and nodded on the stairway landing below me, almost understandingly at last, and turned away.

Race in Debate

If you watch our House floor session each morning at from about 10 AM to noon on line or on public TV, you might have watched some pretty disturbing debate on the grocery tax on Thursday. The 70 of us debated a bill to offer a $30 rebate on your income tax which would climb each year by $10 until it reaches $100. It was one of those moments at which I cringed to be debating along side some of my colleagues on an issue I opposed for completely different reasons.
    Phil Hart was debating against the bill and began by expressing concerns about how people, especially low income people would spend the rebate, which would be as much as $50 even the first year if your income were low enough. He went on for some time about "illegal aliens" and must have said that phrase literally 15 times in only a few minutes. It seems that the proponents of the credit didn’t want to take the tax off food because illegal aliens and tourists in Sun Valley might benefit from the tax cut.
    I am supposing some think it doesn’t get any scarier to Republican law makers than to contemplate a few women in furs and Lycra and some unfortunate person whose visa has expired while her husband’s has not and she chooses to stay in Idaho rather than leaving the kids. Phil did not dwell on the tourists, only those whose "illegal culture" means they have a lot of kids.
    Phil mentioned some odd statistic about how people spent relief money from Katrina. It wasn’t flattering either and I’m guessing was only part of the real story, omitting the people who paid for caskets and house repairs, clothes to replace molded ones soaked in sewage and long gone. I wondered if Phil would ever feel comfortable if people analyzed how he spent his money. I listened and he went on.
     Next he talked about Idaho’s tribes and I cannot for the life of me remember how they were connected because I was on my phone to our Democratic Minority Leader Wendy Jaquet downstairs telling her I was going to stand up and object. She said she’d do it. And so the debate came back to food tax rebates.
    I know well that not every undocumented immigrant in Idaho is Latino and not every person living in New Orleans is black.  Still, later I found Phil at the shooting range and with a smile and pointed humor, gave him a big whack on the arm, explaining that using negative examples ranging from undocumented immigrants to Katrina to Idaho’s tribes was debate chock full of pretty dreadful racist innuendo. He said we all see things from different points of view. I agreed. He smiled sheepishly and said he didn’t mean it. I actually believe he didn’t. I also expect he might be more thoughful next time. 

Triumph of Cynicism

….

Wednesday: I feel like this sinister force is pressing down on this place, like our ugliest, most fearful natures are lurking at the surface, scratching the eyes out of our collective conscience.
    The bean counters are stuffing our ears with starch, pulling the alarm on sirens which have deafened our sense to what is possible. It has driven us into isolation, frozen us spineless in our big, black leather chairs.
    The Darfur divestment bill is dead. Created with the authorization of congress and the president as part of a coordinated strategy to impact the genocide and violent and systematic extermination of a people in Sudan.
    The one chance our nation and state has to make a difference and we fall, believing the whispers that this will be but one of a series of divestment requests — as if national efforts are coordinated through federal legislation every year and as if the genocide of a group of people is acknowledged by world leaders and our own president each year.
    PERSI, the Public Employee Retirement System, insists we are powerless and thus we became so.
    PERSI insists it has no role in public policy yet invested hundreds of hours in defeating this bill, organizing public employee organizations, the Idaho Education Association and Firefighters to oppose Divestment.
    PERSI knows that only one third of one percent of its holdings would be divested and that the list of companies it must avoid is created nationally, yet the managers claim a great burden in having to comply with this divestment legislation. In fact the burden and cost has been their hours spent fighting Divestment itself.
    They insist we should have no role in the world, as if our actions are monetarily and materially isolated. This is the ugliest cynicism. I know because I sat in a college amphitheater in 1986 and listened to Reverend Desmond Tutu’s thanks for my work and the work of thousands of students to bring down the Apartheid government in South Africa through Divestment and the public awareness and international pressure which Divestment created.
    Tutu was a man who spent his life struggling to end the rule of white government which made him, as a black man, a second class citizen with no right to work or pursue freedom and or participate in his country’s political process as an equal. The Apartheid government was condemned worldwide. This was arguably the only other major Divestment movement in the US in the past three decades. Tutu knew the power of dollars and the power of coordinated international efforts. I know that power and I know that as a state we have that power, and with a small action like adopting this legislation we could have been a part of something larger, part of a strategy carefully targeted to place pressure where it is most needed to end violence and bring down a government which is not just cordoning off an ethnic group within its borders, but killing them, to the best of its ability, trying to kill all of them. And do we really feel we have no choice as a state but to stand by and watch?
    I think we know better. I think members of the State Affairs Committee, especially McKenzie, a former co-sponsor, knew better. With this vote, what really have we become?